Audience Panels Correct Big Data Errors: Nielsen’s Hohman

CANNES — Media measuring has come a long way since the days of audiences filling in a weekly diary of their TV consumption, or strapping a funny box to their media device.

Now measuring media consumption is just as likely to be about taking actual raw data from publishers and networks.

But that doesn’t mean the classical audience panel cannot still have relevance today. In fact, it can help data-driven measurement fly, says Nielsen’s EVP for agency solutions.

“They’re gold standard,” David Hohman tells Beet.TV. “They’re audited by the MRC. We have auditors from Ernst & Young in our operations center in Tampa that are there all the time. They’re embedded.

“It provides a level of quality and performance that you can’t get other places. Especially in light of GDPR, the quality of the data is really, really important, and so Nielsen doesn’t compromise. The data is what it says it is. The metadata is consistent, and we’re trying to do that across all the platforms that we engage with.

“What the gold-standard panel does is eliminate, or at least correct for, some of the noise and the anomalies in big data. Data by itself is not useful. It’s the insights you can glean from the data. The insights that you can glean from good data are far superior to just lots of records. The size of the data set is not necessarily the be all and end all of its value.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2018. For more videos from Cannes, please visit this page.

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